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Libertarian Delusions

Fri, 01 Aug 2014 00:00:00 -0400

Recently I was invited to give a lecture on libertarianism at a prestigious Christian college. The large lecture hall was packed with bright-eyed, wholesome-looking Christian students, a number of whom lingered afterward to press their case for . . . libertarianism.

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In Defense of Wendell Berry

Thu, 03 May 2012 00:01:00 -0400

Having written favorably on Wendell Berry, and having edited a collection of essays on his work, I would like to respond to Matt Franck’s critique of Berry’s Jefferson Lecture.

I share Matt’s disappointment with the lecture. I found it to be uncharacteristically long, at times redundant, and overall unbalanced in its treatment of corporations.

Berry’s listeners heard the angry Wendell Berry, defending the things he loves that have been lost, or are in danger of being lost. But like the speech of the angry and wounded Andy Catlett to an agricultural conference in Berry’s novel Remembering , this was not Berry’s finest moment.

As Berry acknowledges in his other writings, government has played its own role in the destruction of local economies and communities, small scale farming, and families. On the other hand, the free market (and this includes corporations) has done much to reduce the price of goods, improve health, and protect the environment. Impersonal market transactions are not a zero-sum game. They only occur when all parties to the transaction benefit.

In the case of James B. Duke, the benefit was cheaper cigarettes made possible by cigarette rolling machines. The fact that the product in question is tobacco itself raises interesting questions I cannot address here, but I would encourage readers to take a look at Tocqueville’s contrast of colonial American settlers in the South and North in Democracy in America , I.1.2. Tocqueville identified the problem of Boomers and Stickers well before Berry, and Berry’s first book The Unsettling of America is an impressive complement to Tocqueville’s analysis.

That being said, the corporate form does present serious problems for the responsible use of resources, and in practice often results in exploitative collusion between corporations and governments that is hostile to the interests of local communities and economies, individual proprietors, farmers, and small businesses. Crony capitalism is not the free market; it is the antithesis to the free market.

Moreover, as Berry’s writings have eloquently and elegantly argued, expense should not be the only consideration of consumers. Economic decisions are inevitably moral decisions, and should always be made with just attention to natural, moral and human ecologies. We should treat manipulative advertising, consumerism, individualism and greed as the evils they are.

But this does not mean government is the solution. Individual economic decisions involve complex and difficult tradeoffs in particular circumstances that cannot be dictated from the top without a serious loss of liberty and misuse of resources. The current administration’s failed policies provide ample evidence of this point.

Unfortunately, Berry’s almost complete silence about government in his lecture almost undoubtedly led many of his listeners to a conclusion he did not in fact make, that government is the solution. It is very difficult to believe that this was Berry’s intention, and it certainly cannot be deduced from his other writings, where governments are as guilty as corporations. Port William, his model of a community based on “membership,” has neither corporations nor a government.

In the end, I would strongly encourage people not to judge Berry based upon this one lecture. He fully deserved the honor of the lecture. His body of work in fiction, poetry, and essays constitutes the most impressive effort in our time to protect, preserve, and deepen the knowledge of the human person that lies at the heart of Western civilization, and to oppose the corrosive influences (utilitarianism, individualism, scientism, industrialism, etc.) that threaten to destroy that knowledge. His life itself is a testament of fidelity to that knowledge, worthy of acknowledgment, recognition, and celebration.

Nathan Schlueter is an associate professor of philosophy at Hillsdale College and a visiting fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton University.

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Constitutional Persons: An Exchange on Abortion

Wed, 01 Jan 2003 00:00:00 -0500

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Drawing Pro-Life Lines

Mon, 01 Oct 2001 00:00:00 -0400

In last fall’s presidential election pro-life voters were faced with a difficult moral choice emblematic of the politics of abortion in general: Does moral principle demand a vote for a marginally pro-life candidate with a chance of winning, or does it demand a vote for a completely pro-life candidate who has little to no chance of winning? Judie Brown of the American Life League, among others, took pro-lifers to task for choosing the former principle rather than the latter in their support of George W. Bush. (For purposes of this discussion, I will accept the claim that Bush is “marginally” pro-life, although the accuracy of the term is debatable.) Pointing out that Bush supports exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother, she reminded voters that “every abortion is a direct attack on God, as Pope John Paul II pointed out in Evangelium Vitae , and therefore a politician who favors this violence, even if only in limited circumstances, is not pro-life. He or she is at odds with God’s commandment: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ I cannot in good conscience cast my vote for someone who favors the total destruction of even one baby, even when I am challenged with the argument that the ‘other guy’ is even worse . . . . It is not . . . our job to get ‘the lesser of two evils’ elected.”

The election, of course, is now long over, but so long as America remains a democratic republic the dilemma will continue in various forms. What, then, is the responsibility of the pro-life voter? Judie Brown’s implication that it is morally illicit to vote for a candidate who supports abortion, even in limited cases, while immensely attractive for those who feel deeply the horror of abortion (as I do), is based on a principle that is deeply flawed and therefore politically dangerous. In the seductive guise of moral purity, it represents a failure to distinguish between degrees of cooperation in moral choice and collapses an ethic of political choice into an individual ethic. In so doing, it virtually removes pro-lifers from effective engagement with politics, and surrenders “the world” to moral evil.

In saying all of this, I should make it clear that my argument is not that all pro-lifers have a responsibility to temporize with evil. People can legitimately disagree over the best course of action in the circumstances, and there are sufficient grounds to make it at least plausible that cooperation with the establishment (the “marginally pro-life”) will not serve the ultimate purpose of ending abortion in America. But this is a calculation of prudence, and differs greatly from the argument that it is morally illicit to support a “marginally” pro-life candidate. It is this last argument that merits careful examination and strong refutation.

What are the principles at stake? First, it is never morally licit to choose an intrinsic evil, such as abortion. The classic case is “Sophie’s choice,” where the mother is asked to choose which child she will spare from death, or both will be killed. The correct choice (though some ethicists disagree on this point) is to refuse to choose even if both children will be killed, and even if one could be saved, for if she chooses, she is cooperating in the evil.

“Sophie’s choice” should be differentiated from “the case of the runaway train.” Here, you are driving a runaway train (that is, with no brakes) which reaches a split in the tracks. On the one side is one person; on the other side are two people. In this case, your responsibility is to choose the “lesser evil,” which is the track with only one person. This case differs from the first in that it does not involve cooperation with moral evil (you are not willing or causing the driving force of the train), and that necessity therefore demands a choice.

Both of the these types of cases, in turn, should be distinguished from “the principle of double effect” in which, under certain circumstances, one must choose a good even with the knowledge that an evil will result. The conditions are: 1) the moral object must not be evil; 2) the evil result is tolerated, not intended; 3) the good effect doesn’t result directly from the evil effect; and 4) there must be a proportionate reason for doing the act. The classic case here is ectopic pregnancy, in which the fallopian tube must be removed, even when the result will be the death of the child. Here the moral object is to save the life of the mother, and the action to achieve that object is removal of the fallopian tube, not the direct killing of the unborn child. The death of the child (a great material evil) is tolerated (not directly intended or caused) because the moral object (the life of the mother) is sufficiently proportionate to it.

Before we can ask into which of these categories a vote for a marginally pro-life candidate should be placed, we must distinguish multiple levels of cooperation with evil. In every abortion, for example, there are multiple persons involved to various degrees. There is the mother, the father (perhaps), the abortionist, the assistants at the clinic, the receptionist, etc. But there is also the manufacturer of the medical instruments that make abortion possible, the owner of the building in which the abortion takes place, the citizens who know abortion is transpiring and yet refuse to help the baby, the judges who gave the woman the “right” to have the abortion, the executive who enforces the “right,” the grocery store that sells the abortionist food and consequently takes “blood money,” and so on, ad infinitum.

Is each of these individuals equally culpable for the murder? Are there some on this list who are not culpable, although they may indirectly have assisted in the murder? We can treat this problem by distinguishing between formal and informal, mediate and immediate types of cooperation. Formal cooperation means that the person intends the same end as the person with whom he or she is cooperating. An example would be the cooperation between the mother seeking the abortion and the abortionist. Both are culpable for the evil in which they cooperate. Informal cooperation refers to a circumstance in which a person does not intend the evil end of the person with whom he or she is cooperating; the extent of moral culpability depends upon the immediacy of the help offered to the person committing the immoral act. Immediate informal cooperation is thus illicit even though the evil is not intended. For example, when the abortion nurse hands the doctor the suction curettage device while telling herself “what this doctor is doing is evil,” she is still culpable. At some point, however, immediate informal cooperation becomes mediate and lessens significantly in culpability. That is, there is some point at which your cooperation with evil intentions is so attenuated that you are no longer culpable for the deeds of the evildoer.

With these principles established, I propose that a vote for a marginally pro-life candidate, under certain circumstances, is (at the very least) an instance of informal, mediate cooperation with evil and corresponds most closely to the principle of double-effect outlined above. Consider the conditions: Is a vote for a marginally pro-life candidate, in this case George W. Bush, an intrinsic evil? No. There is, after all, no commandment that says, “Thou shalt not vote for George Bush.” But does my vote for George Bush make me complicit in abortions that he deems acceptable? Once again, the answer is no, for this case constitutes an informal, mediate cooperation at best. In voting for Bush our intention is to save lives (thus placing it in the informal cooperation category). Nor will our vote directly result in the death of any children (thus the cooperation is not immediate). George W. Bush will not directly kill any unborn children. Abortion law is permissive, not dictative (which is why America is not Nazi Germany; there is no government-sponsored pogrom here). Theoretically, the “right” to abortion could be protected without a single abortion taking place.

In fact, most voting falls under the informal mediate cooperation category. If voters treated perfect consistency and goodness as necessary attributes of candidates for office (assuming we each could discover this down to the last detail before they received our vote), virtually every vote we could cast would be sinful. In choosing a political candidate one must weigh a variety of factors. Among those factors, sanctity of life is foremost, and has a priority above all others. But this is not the only consideration. For example, if a candidate is anti-abortion, but also a Nazi or Fascist or certifiably insane, then one would have to consider the costs involved in choosing him or her. Another factor is the ability to choose the greatest good in the circumstances, so long as that good does not directly involve us in an evil.

“But,” the Judie Brown party might ask, “by protecting the ‘right to kill’ by law in those cases, isn’t Bush cooperating with evil in an illicit way?” It depends. Bush did not create the situation we presently live in. It was handed to him. Thus he must deal with circumstances as they are given. Those circumstances are such that there is virtually no protection for the unborn. In this case he would not be protecting the right to kill the unborn in limited cases, but would be preventing the killing of the unborn in all but those cases. If we were living in a time before Roe v. Wade , the situation might be different.

But still, one might say, “Bush does support the ‘right’ to abortion in some cases, and surely this isn’t good.” To which one must reply: Of course it isn’t, but what are my responsibilities? One responsibility is to achieve the greatest possible good under the circumstances. We live in a regime that protects the right to abortion on demand. How can we best save lives under these circumstances? There is strong reason to believe that a Bush presidency will result in the saving of at least some lives that would otherwise be lost. Note that we are not agreeing to the killing of some to save others. The killing will happen regardless. We are agreeing to the saving of as many lives as we can, and we are willing to tolerate the lesser evil because that is a reasonable choice which meets all of the criteria for double-effect above: our object is to save children (a moral good); we do not intend the death of children in the exceptions; we are not saving the children by killing others (remember, they will die regardless); and the saving of the single life is sufficiently proportionate to the necessity.

Is this, then, to justify a horrendous toleration of evil? Wouldn’t it be best to remove ourselves entirely from it? No. Living in this world nearly always involves some toleration of evil for the sake of a greater good, or to avoid a greater evil. This principle was set forward by Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae (II-II, q.10, a.11) using the government of God as the archetype: “Human government is derived from the Divine government, and should imitate it. Now although God is all-powerful and supremely good, nevertheless He allows certain evils to take place in the universe, which He might prevent, lest, without them, greater goods might be forfeited, or greater evils ensue. Accordingly in human government also, those who are in authority rightly tolerate certain evils lest certain goods be lost, or certain greater evils be incurred.” (Incidentally, both Aquinas and Augustine tolerated prostitution on these grounds.) Of course, government tolerating an evil is not identical to choosing a political candidate, but on examination there is no reason why the same principle should not apply to both cases. Perhaps more to the point is St. Thomas More, recently designated by John Paul II as “patron saint of statesmen.” In the Utopia , in the context of a dispute over whether the philosopher has the responsibility to offer counsel to kings, the character Thomas More responds with the following:

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